Editorial preface
The 'Legacy of Schapera' research project, to conduct research following up
aspects of Isaac Schapera's monumental scholarship on Botswana, is based
within the Department of Sociology at the University of Botswana. As part
of the project Professor Suzette Heald agreed to compile a complete
bibliography of the works of Professor Isaac Schapera, from 1923 to date-a
total of seventy-five years. The bibliography was duly compiled, and appears
as the last article in this issue.
    It was originally intended that this issue of Pula, Botswana Journal of
African Studies should just be an ordinary issue, albeit combining two numbers
of the volume in order for the journal to catch up on its annual publishing
schedule. However, when the issue was brought together from contributions
submitted, it became apparent that the issue touched on a number of topics
which had featured in the scholarship of Isaac Schapera.
    The editorial board of Pula therefore decided to dedicate this issue of the
journal to Professor Schapera, in honour of his remarkable seventy-five
years of extremely important and influential scholarship.
Isaac Schapera's first published article appeared when he was eighteen in
 1923. His first book was published in 1930 when he was twenty-five. It was a
 classic compendium of existing knowledge on the Khoesan-speaking peoples,
 and he had already begun research among the BaKgatla of Botswana.
     This issue of the journal illustrates the wide coverage of Isaac Schapera's
 interests since 1930, with a focus on Botswana, his main geographical area of
 interest. Articles in this issue range from history and law, religious and
 mission studies, literature, to politics and administration, cultural studies, and
 bibliography.
     The issue begins with a revaluation of an aspect of Tswana law and
 custom, by a historian. Contrary to experience elsewhere in colonial Africa,
 it argues that women's property rights were an innovation in indigenous law
 which was reversed under colonialism. Barry Morton suggests that Schapera's
 sources for A Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom (1938) were
 sophisticated, Western-educated neo-traditionalists trying to put the clock
 back-to dish rival female accumulators of property.
     Isaac Schapera first came to Botswana in 1929 to attend the official
 installation of Kgosi Isang as regent of the BaKgatla at Mochudi. Fred
 Morton's article puts Isang's regency within the context of complex internal
 politics, highlighting the role of Seingwaeng, queen-mother of the young
 chief Molefi for whom Isang acted as regent. We see a woman driven by her
 convictions and affiliations into religious separatism, and then into twenty
 years of exile.
     One of Isaac Schapera's crowning achievements is his extraordinary
 detailed and careful editing of the previously unpublished letters and journals
 of the missionary David Livingstone, relating to his early years before he
 became a trans-continental explorer. In this issue, Fidelis Nkomazana makes
 a plea for Livingstone's ideas on combining "legitimate" commerce with
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Christianity to be understood in the context of his early repugnance                  for
slave-trading, rather than his being seen retrospectively            as a harbinger of
colonialism.
     Isaac Schapera's interest in literature can be seen in publications               on
maxims and riddles to the novels of Jane Austen. Our article on literature is
by Henryk Zins, previously author of an appreciation of Isaac Schap~ra. Zins
puts the great-or       is it awful-African   novel Heart of Darkness of hIS fello~
Pole, Joseph Conrad, in the context of the Congo Reform Movement                        In
Britain, campaigning against the genocidal colonialism of King Leopold II of
Belgium. The Congo showed what could go wrong when colonialism took on
the mantles of the civilizing mission and "legitimate" commerce presaged by
Livingstone.
       Between about 1936 and 1951, Isaac Schapera was a valued advisor to the
 local tribal and central colonial administrations. His speciality being a number
 of reports on land tenure. Such work could be counted irrelevant in the 1960s
 and 1970s, when the main focus of government                        in Botswana      was
 centralization    and suppression of "tribalism". But decentralization          and land
 tenure have become live issues again since the 1980s. In this issue Mogopodi
 Lekorwe takes up questions of the desirability and democratization               of civic
 self-governance,      rather than urban management by central government,             for
 the capital city of Gaborone.
      In the arcane way of academics, Isaac Schapera may be classified in the
 British school of "social anthropology"         rather than the American school of
  "cultural anthropology",       but that should not obscure the fact he has written
  so much about culture. In this issue, Isaac Mazonde takes up the thorny issue
  of how-rather       than if-Botswana      can have a national cultural policy. He
  argues that Botswana has got beyond its post-independence                     phase of
  centralization    and suppression of diversity, and a multi-cultural        approach is
  needed to make all the flowers bloom. Mazonde looks beyond ethnic or
  "tribal" diversity to the recognition of the special needs of the poor, women,
  and youth.
       The last article in this issue is a bibliography of works by and on Isaac
  Schapera-the      fourth bibliography to appear since 1969, and surely there will
  be a fifth in future. Because problems and phenomena                  studied by Isaac
   Schapera     are re-emerging         in modem       form,    this bibliography      was
   commissioned to make researchers more aware of the whole corpus of Isaac
   Schapera's scholarship. As was remarked at a conference in 1980 it takes a
   whole village of scholars and administrators          to study today wh~t Schapera
   studied almost alone in the 1930s and 1940s ..
       Finally, in this issue, a book review takes us back to the topic of women's
   property and other rights, in the context of laws and customs in Botswana
   today.
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